Abstract

One of the key challenges of markerless Augmented Reality (AR) systems, where no a priori information of the environment is available, is map and scale initialization. In such systems, the scale is unknown as it is impossible to determine the scale from a sequence of images alone. Implementing scale is vital for ensuring that augmented objects are contextually sensitive to the environment they are projected upon. In this paper we demonstrate a sensor and vision fusion approach for robust and user-friendly initialization of map and scale. The map is initialized, using inbuilt accelerometers, whilst scale is initialized by the camera auto-focusing capability. The later is possible by applying the Depth From Focus (DFF) method, which was, till now, limited to high precision camera systems. The demonstrated illustrates benefits of such a system, which is running on a commercially available mobile phone Nokia N900.